The Cinema Makers. Public Life and the Exhibition of Difference in South-Eastern and Central Europe since the 1960s

The Cinema Makers investigates how cinema spectators in south-eastern and central European cities became cinema makers through such practices as squatting in existing cinema spaces, organizing cinema ‘events’, writing about film and making films themselves. Drawing on a corpus of interviews with cinema activists in Germany, Austria and the former Yugoslavia, Anna Schober compares the activities and artistic productions they staged in cities such as Vienna, Cologne, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Novi Sad, Subotica, Zagreb and Sarajevo. The resulting study illuminates the differences and similarities in the development of political culture—and cinema’s role in that development—in European countries with pluralist-democratic, one-party socialist and post-socialist traditions.
Key features include:
•    an account of cinema as a political and social transnational movement emerging with ‘1968’ that contests reigning forms of managing and controlling difference connected to the modern nation state
•    an exploration of theories and conceptions of the public sphere and how they connect to cinema as an urban arena
•    a close reading of films by authors produced by cinema activism of the 1960s, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Dušan Makavejev
•    follow-up cinema activist groups in the 1990s, such as clandestine flash mob cinemas, ethnic or queer cinema initiatives (in central Europe) or short-film cinema activism (in ex-Yugoslavia) confronting the violence of war and ethnic cleansing with an emphatic use of humour